


Building the Castle of Roses

by Luzula



Category: Sleeping Beauty - Fandom
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Closed Ecological Systems, Coming of Age, Fairy Tales, Gen, Mentor Relationship, Misses Clause Challenge, Science, Science Fiction, Space Flight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 17:58:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luzula/pseuds/Luzula
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sleeping Beauty in space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Building the Castle of Roses

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LostWendy1](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LostWendy1/gifts).



> LostWendy1, I hope you enjoy this and that it hasn't wandered too far from the traditional fairy tale. This is a story I've had in my head for years, so it was good to finally get the chance to write it down. Happy holidays!
> 
> Thank you to my beta readers.

Rose slept. 

Her body was cold and lifeless, her mind without dreams. 

Outside the vessel that carried her, there was nothing but the empty space between the stars. It meant death: by vacuum, by radiation, by cold, by the impact of a rock at high velocity. 

And yet there was also the means of life, carefully guarded and protected by the walls of the ship. There was air, and water, and seeds, and single-celled algae that would bloom and photosynthesize under the light of another sun. 

Rose slept, and waited for the time when she would arrive. 

***

It was a girl.

Or it would have been. The man who would have been her father read the message again, then wordlessly handed the reading pad to the woman beside him.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he said, his voice low and defeated.

She read the short, officially encrypted message, then made a low sound and hugged her belly protectively. "No."

"Why didn't you?" he repeated. 

"I was only seventeen. I didn't even keep him. And I had a different name then, in a different country. I didn't think they'd know."

"Of course they know," he said bitterly. He took the reading pad again, needing to see it in black and white:

_Records indicate that you have already given birth to a child. Therefore you are required to abort your current pregnancy, according to paragraph 1.3 of the Population Restriction Law. For questions, please turn to your local government office._

***

"Look, if everyone had an exception, where would we be?" The official looked tired, yet sympathetic, as she sat behind her desk. She sounded as though she had said the same thing many times before.

"I know, but...she was so young!" the man said, even knowing that it was hopeless.

"It's still the law. Every country ratified the population treaty back in '25, you know that," the official said patiently. But something about the couple sitting in front of her, the woman with her hand on her belly, must have moved her.

"There is one solution I can offer you," she said. The sun shone in through the window, and in that moment the man thought that her blond hair glowed around her, as if she were an angel of mercy. But she held up her hand.

"Don't thank me yet. It's not a particularly good deal." She pressed a few buttons on the keyboard in front of her, looking like a middle-aged government official once more. "You could keep her for now, but at the age of five, you'd have to give her up to the space program. She'd be trained from an early age, and when she's grown up, she'd leave on one of the interstellar exploration flights. You'd never see her again."

She turned the screen towards them, to show them the fine print: the fetus would have to pass a strict genetic examination in order to qualify, and would be subjected to certain treatments in utero.

They looked at each other. Five years were better than none.

And she would live.

***

When Rose was five years old, they came for her.

"I'm Dr. Maryam Malfleur, from the Institute of Space Exploration," the stern-looking, dark-haired woman introduced herself. "This is Dr. Kim, our expert in child development."

Rose looked up at them. She was a brown-haired little girl with large, serious eyes. Her parents, behind her, did not have the same equanimity.

Dr. Kim knelt down and smiled. "Rose, would you like to play a game with me?"

She considered, then nodded, and he led her into the next room. Her parents watched as Dr. Kim led her through various games, some involving patterns that changed, some seeming to be memory games.

"What's this supposed to accomplish?" said her mother. She had refused to shake hands with their guests.

"It's an intelligence test," said Dr. Malfleur. "We can only get so far with genetic analyses. But we have high hopes for your daughter. Of course, she'll have to pass a physical examination, too."

"What if she fails?" asked her father, with narrowed eyes. "Then I suppose you'll just discard her."

"We're not monsters, whatever you may think," Dr. Malfleur said calmly. "The state will take good care of her, either way. And she will contribute to the further knowledge of mankind. "

Rose did not fail. 

***

Dr. Malfleur looked through a one-way window into a sun-filled room, where six children were at play, toys scattered around. Rose and Slimane, a dark-skinned little boy with a curly head of hair, were building a complicated tower of Lego.

"What do you say? Are they coming along well?"

Dr. Kim nodded. "I'd say so. We had to switch out one of the boys—he showed strong bullying tendencies—but the group seems to be well-balanced now."

"Good. I'll be very interested to see how they develop."

"Yes, well. I think we got them early enough. At any rate, it should be a sufficiently early age for the Westermarck effect to set in. That will significantly decrease the sexual tension later on." 

Dr. Malfleur nodded. That was important in a group that would spend so much time together, and who would, ultimately, only have each other to rely on. She had always held herself aloof from dalliances in the workplace herself, but she had seen the conflict they could cause.

Dr. Kim looked down at the children again. Two of them, Constance and Alain, were playing a computer game on the large built-in touch screen on the wall. He hesitated, then said in a low voice, "Do you never feel that we are playing God?"

Dr. Malfleur glanced sharply at him. "Are you one of the critics, too? These children wouldn't even be alive if not for us. And we'll be giving them the best education possible."

"And then we'll be sending them out into the great unknown."

"To serve science and the human race. I'd go myself if I could." It had been the most cherished dream of her youth, but she had never applied. A slight murmur in her heart and some immune system anomalies meant that she would have been turned down, and she had known it.

Dr. Kim might have had more misgivings, but if so, he didn't voice them. 

***

After six months at the Institute, Rose's memories of her parents were growing fuzzy around the edges. Her mother had strong arms and soft breasts, and had smelled of floral shampoo. Her father had read stories to her in the evenings, and made her crèpes on Sundays. 

But she didn't cry for them at night anymore. Earlier, when she had cried, someone had always been there to comfort her and stroke her hair. The Institute was fully aware of the importance of human contact to ensure a healthy development.

During the days there was plenty to distract her. Rose had been the only child in her home, as all children were who didn't live in communal housing, and living with other children was new to her. But she adjusted quickly to her new playmates. There was a comfort in their little herd, living all together in one big dormitory, with adults always nearby, ready to see to their needs, or to praise or correct them. 

But more important than her playmates was her schooling. 

She had loved it when someone read to her, and she'd always been curious about the little black squiggles on the reading pads. Her father had told her that the squiggles told him how the story went, and that in a few years, she could learn to read them, too.

At the Institute she was told that she could learn it now; indeed, she was encouraged to do just that. Rose threw herself into learning to read with all the enthusiasm of an under-stimulated child. She learned mathematics with a speed that delighted her tutors, and her five playmates learned along with her. They all had the benefit of expert teachers, who gave them praise and encouragement and challenged their minds with a new concept as soon as they mastered one. 

***

Dr. Malfleur looked around at the six young faces. They were growing fast. Almost into puberty now, but inshallah, they would deal with those problems when they came to them. Not that she was religious--the expression was an old mental, or perhaps cultural, habit.

"You are now old enough to choose your specialties. There are certain skills which will be essential for all of you, and you will all be cross-trained in other disciplines, but we'd like you to have as much freedom to choose your areas as possible."

Dr. Malfleur stopped to observe their faces. She thought Constance looked excited, with a good-natured smile, Slimane calm and controlled, Yue attentive, Alain impatient and squirming in his seat, Rémy focused, with his chin in his hands, and Rose--she looked much the same as she always did, a little reserved, but watching Dr. Malfleur intently. Well, as far as she could tell, anyway--she wasn't an expert in child psychology, like Dr. Kim. 

"You will all be given a chance to see experts demonstrate both the theoretical and the practical aspects of these fields before you choose. Your teachers will help you evaluate your strengths and help you choose."

***

Rose found most things interesting: computer programming, navigation, ship design and maintenance, astrobiology. But when Dr. Malfleur held her lecture on biosystems, which was her own specialty, Rose was captivated. Dr. Malfleur was just so different from most of their other teachers--she was sharp where they were patient and encouraging, and demanded absolute attention. 

"And so you see why this is such a challenge," Dr. Malfleur wrapped up her lecture. "Biology is by far the most complicated of the natural sciences--physics and chemistry are simple by comparison. And with a spaceship we're dealing with one of the most difficult problems of all: a closed system. The Earth is a closed system materially but not with regard to energy; it constantly receives energy from the sun, which allows life to flourish. On a spaceship, what we're attempting is nothing less than to keep the second law of thermodynamics at bay for as long as we can."

Dr. Malfleur looked around the room, scrutinizing each of them in turn. "Questions?"

Rose said nothing, but she made up her mind then and there.

***

"Dr. Malfleur?" Rose knocked on the partway-open door and looked in. Dr. Malfleur's office was rather bare. Besides the usual computer equipment, there were a scattering of old-fashioned books and printed-out articles, and a cup of black espresso. On the wall there was a piece of calligraphy in Arabic. 

"Yes?" said Dr Malfleur, and looked up. In the window there was a single potted ficus, perhaps a symbol of her specialty, and Rose took courage from that. 

"Dr. Malfleur, I'd like to specialize in biosystems."

"Do you? Tell me why."

Rose hadn't expected that, though of course she should have. "Well," she floundered, feeling Dr. Malfleur’s sharp gaze on her. "I like growing things. Those experiments we did with pea plants, back when we first started to learn about Mendel and genetics—I liked to watch over them and see how they grew each day--"

Oh, she sounded like a sentimental little girl. Rose gritted her teeth and went on. "And it sounds like a challenge, to make it all work, to make sure everything goes around and that everything that's wasted somewhere is used somewhere else."

"Do you like challenges?"

Rose tilted her chin up stubbornly. "Yes."

Dr. Malfleur nodded slowly. "We'll give it a try, then. You'll be under my supervision; we'll start tomorrow. Be here at nine."

***

During the first trial period of a month, Rose was convinced that Dr. Malfleur thought she was a failure. She'd been doing well on her biology exams and she loved tending to the plants in the greenhouse, and she'd thought that would make her well prepared. But the problems Dr. Malfleur gave her were nothing like the neat little packaged questions on the exams. They were huge and messy and fuzzy around the edges. Rose almost came close to crying over one assignment where she was supposed to track the phosphate flows of the greater Paris area and how they had changed over the last one hundred and fifty years. 

"How am I supposed to know when I've got it right?" she complained to Constance. Rose was face-down on her bed over her reading pad, rubbing her eyes tiredly. "And besides, it's not like Paris is a spaceship anyway."

Constance murmured something sympathetic, then said, "Why did you choose her as a teacher anyway? She's mean."

"She's not mean," Rose said. "She's just…I don't want her to think I'm a failure."

"You're not a failure. I don't know why she's making you think you are." Constance yawned. "Come on, put that down. I'm sleepy." 

The next day Rose presented herself in Dr. Malfleur's office, as ready with the assignment as she could be with the week's time she'd gotten for it. 

"Well?" Dr. Malfleur said. 

"Well, I don't have any precise figures. I mean, it's such a large system, and there aren't any detailed records…"

"I'm aware of that," Dr. Malfleur interrupted. "Give me the big picture."

Rose did, as far as she could. She talked about how food went into the city along with the phosphates in the food, and how those phosphates went down the Seine with the sewage. She talked about the building of sewage plants, and then about how the city had started separating food waste and human waste products from other waste and transporting it back to the farmland around the city. 

"And what brought about that trend?" 

"Well, environmental goals? We don't want to waste the nutrients."

"Why could they be wasted in the 20th century?" 

Rose stopped to think. She almost said something about people being naturally wasteful back then, but didn't. She knew that wasn't the answer Dr. Malfleur wanted. Rose frowned, and thought about all the the web searches she'd done for this assignment. Somewhere in there… "Because there was a lot of phosphorus being mined back then. But we're running out of it now. We can't afford to waste it." 

Dr. Malfleur nodded sharply. "Yes, that's right. We've realized it's a non-renewable resource." 

Rose felt a small glow of triumph at giving the right answer. And suddenly she saw it, how this had to do with spaceships, how they had to take care of everything there, so much more carefully than around Paris. 

"For your next assignment, I want you to look at the nutrient cycles in European farmland before the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process. More specifically, I want you to look at medieval Europe around the time of the Black Death." 

Rose swallowed. "So…you mean I can stay with you? And do biosystems?"

Dr. Malfleur looked surprised. "Yes, of course. I'd have told you if I thought the specialty didn't fit you."

Rose walked out of Dr. Malfleur's office with her heart singing. Over the next few days, she threw herself into her new assignment, and learned about how careful farmers had to be with nitrogen back in the days when you couldn't just make it out of the air, and how the number of fields you had depended on the amount of manure you could get from your animals, and how the numbers of animals you could have depended on the amount of hay you could bring in for the winter. She learned about how the Black Death had relieved the population pressure and actually let the fields recover from too intensive farming, even though it was a human tragedy. 

***

They were all of them growing older by now, and their bodies were changing. This was not a surprise, of course—they'd all learned about human biology, but it was different when it was actually happening to you. Rose was growing big breasts that ached. 

"I wish I was like you," she complained to Yue, who still hardly had any. "They're just a bother."

Yue shrugged, in her quiet way. "I might still get them. Maybe I'm just late."

They all took their showers in the big common shower room, so the boys' bodies weren't a mystery to her, either, at least not the way they looked. On their thirteenth birthdays they'd been given their own rooms, instead of all sleeping in the big dorm room. It had felt strange, a bit, not to know that the others were there all around her, but once she had it, Rose liked her little bit of privacy. In the darkness after the lights were out, she explored her own body. Masturbation was entirely normal and healthy, she knew that from health class, but she'd never quite gotten why it was such a big deal until she finally got the knack of it, and then she did it most nights. 

Of course, all their rooms still faced out to the big common area where they all spent most of their time when they weren't taking lessons or doing their exercise. It was called exercise now, not play, and they knew why it was so important to keep it up. Space travel leached the calcium from your bones and atrophied your muscles, even if people were working on ways of preventing that. 

Rose was working intensively on her second specialty now, which was computer programming. She liked the order of it, the way programs always did exactly what she told them to do and nothing more (even if that wasn't always what she'd intended from the start). It was a far cry from the complications of biosystems, and also a relief from her unruly body and emotions. 

They were all into puberty now, and it had hit Rose hard. She found herself resenting Dr. Malfleur and her impossible assignments, and she was even annoyed with peaceable Yue. They had counselors, of course, and it did help a little, even though Rose felt that they didn't really understand. It wasn't like they were expected to be experts in two subjects and go into space. 

***

"Do you think we'll lose any of them?" Dr. Malfleur asked Dr. Kim. 

He shook his head. "It's hard to say." 

She found his smooth Korean face hard to read. "You're the psychologist," she pressed him. 

"Child psychology," he said mildly. "They're hardly young children anymore." 

"You're right. That's the problem, I suppose." Puberty did have a way of throwing a wrench in the works, although Dr. Malfleur herself couldn't remember going through the sort of rebellion that many teenagers had. But the alienation, the feeling of no one else understanding you, she did remember that. 

"Rose has been resentful lately," she said, and then regretted it. She hardly wanted to admit to herself how much she hoped that Rose wouldn't be one to rebel too hard. Rose showed promise. Very much so, although of course she hadn't told the girl as much—it wouldn't do to let her become complacent. There was still so much for her to learn. 

"Over what, exactly?" 

Dr. Malfleur shrugged, unwilling to elaborate. "The usual teenage troubles, I suppose." 

***

Rose was building her own small closed biosystems now, starting with tightly-sealed bottles of algae and bacteria. She stared dolefully at the latest one, which had turned brown overnight, the balance between the species wrong. Or maybe it had been contaminated somehow. 

She worried at her lip while she scanned the sheet of equations of input and output of CO_2 and O_2 once more. 

There it was. Rose made a frustrated grunt and smacked herself in the forehead. Just a minus that should've been a plus, and it all went to hell. If she couldn't even get a simple single-celled two-species system right, how was she ever going to manage a spaceship? There were a hundred ways things could go wrong, a hundred ways they could all die before they even reached their destination. It wasn't like she herself was actually building the spaceship biosystem--there was a whole team of scientists and engineers working on it--but she had to be able to understand it and handle it, and how was she supposed to do that when she couldn't even...Rose huffed out a sharp breath. 

And what was the point of it all, anyway? 

Rose looked at the top shelf of the lab. The Institute had one of xxx's closed biosystems from the 1970's, still green and healthy, with photosynthesis and respiration churning merrily away in the sunlight from the window. Rose stared up at it, wondering at how unattainable it seemed. 

And despite her earlier doubt as to the point of it all, she pulled on a new pair of sterile gloves and set about making a new mixture that hopefully wouldn't crash and burn. She avoided Dr. Malfleur's office on her way back. 

When she got to their common room, only Slimane was there, immersed in his reading pad. He looked up, blinking, when she came in and threw herself on one of the sofas. 

"Hi," he said, nodding at her. "How are your cultures coming along?" 

"Not well." She sighed deeply and buried her head in a pillow. 

But Slimane was not the type to take note of dramatic gestures, so Rose dragged herself up from the sofa and withdrew to her own room, where she curled up on the bed. She had a window looking out on an inner yard, with a _platane_ tree dropping its yellow leaves in the dry Mediterranean autumn. Rose looked dolefully at it, despite its beauty. All those organic processes inside the tree, just _working_ without anybody having to tinker with it or fine-tune it. 

No, she had to stop thinking about biosystems and how she was failing at it. Rose closed her eyes and retreated into a daydream she'd been having more and more often, where she grew up with her biological parents, without all the pressure of the Institute. Where she didn't have to fail. 

Did her parents remember her at all? Did they wish they could have kept her? It wasn't fair--it wasn't like she'd had any choice in all this. 

A knock on the door. "Rose? You there?"

Constance, of course. 

"Coming," Rose said. She got up from her bed and opened the door. 

"I made some tea, if you want some?" Constance said, holding out a cup. "Did you get that culture to work?"

Rose made a face. "I don't want to talk about it. What's going on with you?"

"I tried to repair broken airlocks all day? Gah, it's harder than you'd think." Constance looked down at her big-boned, strong hands, which had a few scrapes. 

Rose had very little idea about what that would be like. She hummed encouragingly, and then listened to Constance's comfortable chatter about vacuum seals and air pressure while they had tea. But still, she couldn't help those nagging thoughts, and she soon retreated into her room again. 

***

Not for nothing was computer programming Rose's second specialization. She hacked into the Institute's encrypted records and found her parents' last names, addresses and contact information.

She was surprised to find that her mother and father didn't even live in the same city anymore--somehow, she had pictured them as they last were in her hazy memories of childhood.

But she was still their daughter. Nervously, she typed in the contact number for her father's residence and waited.

"Yeah?" A boy, perhaps six years old, appeared on the screen.

She looked at him in consternation. "Maybe I have the wrong number. I'm looking for Pascal."

"Yeah, let me get him. He's in the kitchen." The boy disappeared, and she could hear him shouting, "Dad? It's for you."

 _Dad?_ Then he appeared, a thin man with a beard, drying his hands on a kitchen towel. She tried to think that she recognized him, but if she was honest with herself, she didn't.

"Yes?" he said.

"I'm Rose," she blurted out. "Your daughter."

His mouth opened. He looked like he had seen a ghost—as if she was dead, and he had exorcised her memory long ago. They stared at each other in silence.

Finally, he cleared his throat and said, "How are you, Rose?"

"I'm...I just wanted to see you," she said. Somehow she had never realized how awkward this moment would be. She'd pictured her parents greeting her with open arms. 

"Yes, well. Your mother and I separated some time ago. I met someone else, and..." And had another child, Rose finished silently, from a woman who hadn’t had one already.

"Are they taking good care of you at the Institute?" he asked.

This was the moment when she would have poured forth all her cares and worries, but she couldn't. He was a stranger, and lived a life that was so different from hers that she could hardly imagine it.

"Fine. I'm fine," she said.

"Good. I'm glad you're all right."

The call ended soon after that. 

Rose stared at the screen. She didn't really feel like calling her mother, as well. But it would be a waste not to use the information when she'd worked so hard to track it down, and anyway, she was enough of a teenager to do it out of pure contrariness.

She took a deep breath and did it. The call was accepted.

"Hello, this is Régina." Her mother looked soft, plump, with a flowing blouse. 

"Um, hi." Rose said. "I'm Rose. Your daughter."

"Rose?" Her eyes widened. "Is it really you?"

"Yes. I, well, I wanted to see you."

"Oh, honey. You don't know how we missed you when they took you away." She reached out a hand to the screen. "My baby."

Rose smiled uncertainly.

"How are they treating you? Is it very hard on you?" her mother asked.

Rose had wanted sympathy, but perversely, now that she was offered it, she found it cloying. After all, she wasn't a little baby any more.

"Well, I'm in training," she said. "This week, I'm learning to debug the navigational code."

Her mother frowned, looking confused. "My dear, how I wish you could have had a normal life, with us. I tried appealing to the authorities, several times, but they insisted you had to stay in that awful place. Children aren't made to work so hard when they're so small."

Well, that had gone well, Rose thought in frustration when the conversation was over. She might as well have confided in Dr. Malfleur, for all the good it would've done her. 

***

When Rose turned twenty, all six of them spent two months in the biosystem prototype on the Institute grounds. It was a trial run, both of the system itself, and of the team's ability to cope when shut up in a small space together. 

Not that it was really all that different from how they normally lived, Rose thought wryly. Their rooms were smaller, just space enough for a bunk and not much more, but Rose was still very grateful for the personal space. 

She missed her window, though. In space there would be cold, empty vacuum outside, not the earthly comfort of a _platane_ tree and the sky. Rose shuddered a little, thinking about it. That was how she thought of the biosystem, she realized--like a bubble of Earth that they wrapped around themselves, like tendrils of plants curling protectively around their little craft. 

"Rose? Dinnertime!" Alain's voice, and a knock on the door. "Come and eat your algae soup." 

Alain was joking, of course--nobody had ever managed to make satisfactory human food out of single-celled algae, although not for lack of trying. 

"Coming!" Rose went out to the common room. 

Alain and Constance were really the glue that kept the group together, Rose thought as she emerged from her private little den. Alain made people laugh, which was often a welcome relief, and Constance was the kind of person who'd check in on you, if you spent the day trying to make sense of the trace gas readouts in their closed-in atmosphere and didn't even notice you were hungry. 

"You should exercise more," Slimane said, frowning, when she took her place at the table. 

"It's only a trial run," Rose said, a little irritated. "I'm not going to atrophy or anything." 

"Oh, come on. He's only doing his job," Constance said. 

Which was true. Slimane was the medical expert, and Rose conceded the point with a sigh. "Right. I'll take a run on the treadmill tomorrow. I promise." 

Rose understood Slimane's urge to make this more like the real thing. They were all doing it--Yue running complex navigational simulations on the computers, Constance testing their equipment to within an inch of its life. And Rose herself was fiercely engaged in the test of the biosystems, which was, in her not-unbiased opinion, the most important thing going on in this trial run. She was running it all herself, as she'd have to do on the ship, although of course they were closely monitored from outside as well. 

Rémy was also being schooled to run the biosystems, as his second specialization, although Rose found herself being a little proprietary about it. Still, it wasn't like Rémy didn't qualify for it--he'd been studying astrobiology and planetary science, and when they reached their destination, he'd be in charge of exploration there. Rose had been learning a bit about that, too. 

But above all, Rose wanted to do a good job with the prototype biosystem. She obsessively tweaked the algae cultures and studied the readouts: CO2 level, O2 level, trace gases. Sometimes she'd stand and watch over the crops, or look at the tilapia swim in their tank, to and fro, eating and growing. She knew she wasn't the only one responsible if things went wrong--there was such a thing as design flaws, after all--but it was hard not to fret. 

One night she woke up from a nightmare about it all turning out like Biosphere 2 back in the 20th century, with the oxygen levels dropping until they all were gasping to breathe. God, she was never letting that happen.

Rose was acutely aware that Dr. Malfleur was outside, leading the group that was analyzing the results of her every action. 

At least she didn't think about her parents any more. Actually talking to them had killed that off--they were so far from her world that she hadn't even had anything to talk about with them. Although she couldn't help but wonder if the Institute had let her find those addresses. Had they watched her make those calls, with psychologists analyzing her every word? God, but she hated feeling like a lab rat. She needed at least some space to call her own. 

***

Dr Malfleur rubbed at her temples, trying to ward off her incipient headache. She should eat something. As her body occasionally reminded her, espresso was not food. 

The days after the end of the trial run had been busy. They'd had access to a lot of data during the run, of course, but some tests they could only do after they'd opened the habitat. 

She and Rose had spent today going over the decisions Rose had made during the trial run. The results were satisfactory, as Dr. Malfleur had told Rose, although there were still problems with the rising trace amounts of methane, and there were concerns over the fungus that had infected the strain of potato they were currently using. Rose argued for greater diversity in crop plants, and Dr. Malfleur was inclined to agree with her, despite the need for exhaustive testing of every crop candidate. Rose was quite capable by now, and Dr. Malfleur enjoyed their mentoring sessions, always striving to ask the hard questions, the ones that would spur Rose to greater insights. The questions that might save her on the actual mission. 

It had been frustrating during the test run, being on the outside, with no control over what was going on in the habitat. Outside of emergencies, of which there had been none, they didn't even communicate with the team inside, to ensure as realistic a situation as possible. 

Oh, Dr. Malfleur had known she wasn't going on the mission herself--she had always known it--but seeing Rose disappear into the prototype ship without her had made something constrict within her chest. 

She rose with a sigh, and headed for the Institute cafeteria. Well, if she wasn't going, Rose was, and Dr. Malfleur would do her best to make sure she was prepared. 

***

Rose had known since she was five what would happen in her twenty-fifth year, but despite having spent most of her life preparing, it had never seemed quite real. 

Now there was less than a month left until they'd leave. 

They were up on the ISS 4 now, where the ship was being put together. They'd all been up here before, doing EVA training and acclimating to life in space, but now it was final--they'd left Earth for good. 

Rose could see the Earth from the thick window on the observation deck, and she stood there, looking down at the constantly changing surface. The orbital period was only about one and a half hours, and she'd been watching while they passed over the night-dark Middle America, with its clusters of lights like ganglia, then past the terminator, somewhere over the Atlantic. They were coming up over north Africa and southern Europe now--the Mediterranean was so blue. Flocks of white clouds obscured southern France. 

Rose looked up at a sound, to see Yue standing beside her. She nodded at Rose, and they watched together silently while the steppes of western Asia passed below them, with their clear cloudless continental skies. The Himalayas came up wreathed in clouds, and passed by, and they were over China. 

"I've never been there," Yue said quietly. 

"Were you born in France?" Rose hadn't thought to wonder, before. They all belonged to the Institute, anyway. 

Yue nodded. Rose touched her shoulder awkwardly. They fell into silence again, watching. 

***

Rose lay in her berth, ready for hibernation. Her arms lay straight along her sides, and her features were calm, or so Dr. Malfleur thought. 

"Good luck," Dr. Malfleur said, and pressed the button that would insert the needle into Rose's vein. She met Rose's gaze one last time, then turned away. 

Rose did not see, and she would hardly have believed it if she did, that Dr. Malfleur was crying.

***

Around Rose and her companions, the ship lived its own life, turning to face the sun. The green of photosynthesizing plants blossomed under the light, and huge translucent wings were set to take advantage of the solar wind and save fuel. 

But as they went farther from the light of the sun, the ship closed down, as if for the onset of winter. It travelled through the blackness of space like a dormant seed.

Like the ship, Rose hibernated and did not dream—she was far too deep under for that. Only the computers were awake, to keep watch over their trajectory and any debris that might get in their way.

A period of time passed; let us call it a hundred years.

***

Then, light came. 

It came not all at once, like a lamp switched on, but slowly, gradually, like a sunrise in high latitudes on a planet. Seeds that had long been inactive were supplied with nutrient solution, and they germinated, pushing up and out. Small green leaves unfurled and turned their faces to the new sun, and in their cells, tiny chloroplasts worked, turning the light to oxygen and sugar.

The ship was waking up.

Rose woke, too. She could not have said in which moment she became aware. It was a gradual process, and for what seemed like a long time, her whole world was the red of light seen through closed eyes and the low humming of the ship.

Then she opened her eyes and took her first deep, conscious breath. She knew where she was. 

Rose looked at the status lights on the inside of her berth--all green--and pushed a button to open the lid of her berth. She sat up, then stood up shakily, her muscles feeling weak and unused. 

Yue was sitting on the berth next to her, and Rose nodded at her. Yue smiled back. Another berth was open and empty, three others still closed. Slimane came into the cabin. 

"Rose. You awake now?" he said. 

Rose moved her fingers and toes, taking pleasure in the fact that they moved. She thought of the work ahead, keeping the life in their vulnerable little vessel alive. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible in the long run, but it was what she had been trained to do. She thought of Dr. Malfleur back on Earth--she would be dead by now, Rose realized with a pang, and would never know if Rose had succeeded or not. Rose tightened her hand on the edge of the berth. She would do Dr. Malfleur proud. 

And outside the ship, there was a new, unknown world waiting for them. 

"Yes, I am," she said.

**Author's Note:**

> The book _Manmade Closed Ecological Systems_ by Gitelson, Lisovsky and MacElroy was useful for science inspiration, but any faults or flights of fancy are of course my own.


End file.
